To sum up, the melioristic bias is a deflection toward language which glosses over reality without necessarily giving us a philosophic vocabulary. One could go so far as to say that such language is comparatively lacking in responsibility. It is the language that one expects from those who have become insulated or daintified. It carries a slight suggestion of denial of evil, which in lay circles, as in some ecclesiastical ones, is among the greatest heresies. Perhaps the sociologist would inspire more confidence as a social physician if his language had more of the candor described above, and almost certainly he would get a better understanding of his diagnosis. IV _Do the social scientists lose more than they gain by a distrust of metaphor?_ Dr. Johnson once remarked of Swift, “The rogue never hazards a metaphor,” and that may well be the reaction of anyone who has plowed through the drab pages of a contemporary sociologist. It has long been suspected that sociologists and poets have little confidence in one another, and here their respective procedures come into complete contrast. The poet works mainly with metaphor, and the sociologist will have none of it. Which is right? Or, if each is doing instinctively the thing that is right for him, must we affirm that the works they produce are of very unequal importance? One can readily see how the social scientist might be guided by the simple impression that, since metaphor characterizes the language of poetry, it has, for that very reason, no place in the language of science. Or, if he should become more analytical, he might conclude that metaphor, through its very operation of analogy or transference, implies the existence of a realm which positivistic study denies. To use metaphor, then, would be to pass over to the enemy. But he would be a very limited kind of sociologist, a sort of doctrinaire mechanist, not fully posted on all the resources open to scientific inquiry. There are two more or less familiar theories of the nature of metaphor. One holds that metaphor is mere decoration. It is like the colored lights and gewgaws one hangs on a Christmas tree; the tree is an integral tree without them, but they do add sparkle and novelty and so are good things for such occasions. So the metaphors used in language are pleasurable accessories, which give it a certain charm and lift but which are supererogatory when one comes down to the business of understanding what is said. This theory has been fully discredited not only by those who have analyzed the language of poetry, but also by those who have gone furthest into the psychology of language itself and have explored the “meaning of meaning.”